The Truth With Proof by Mary C. Findley

“Trust me. I’m a Scientist.”

Hubby is working on the Conflict of the Ages Part 3: “They Deliberately Forgot” –The Flood and the Ice Age. Yes, this series has pretty cumbersome titles, doesn’t it? The first part is based on 2 Peter 3:5, where Peter nails the whole secularist amnesia and its resulting erroneous dogma.

In this work-in-progress, he quotes from a site called Talk Origins, where Secularists prepare their minions to go forth and do battle with nasty Creationists. That’s not the way they put it, of course. They claim to be objective educators simply trying to teach truth and prevent lies from invading impressionable minds. Uniformitarians are the truth-tellers, of course, and Creationists are the liars.

In our book, we are talking about science and history related to the flood and the ice age. You don’t really need to understand radiohalos to get the point of this blog post, but here’s a brief explanation. They are tiny colored spherical shells in rocks caused by alpha particle decay of radioactive isotopes, usually uranium, found primarily in biotite crystals within pieces of granite. These can be evidence of the age of the sample.

What you do need to understand is that the article on the Talk Origins site about radiohalos: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html:
is classic secularist strategy. Here are the steps in their process of discrediting Creation Science.

#1 Assert millions of years
“Plutonic rocks on the other hand cool very slowly, on the order of a million years or more for some deeply buried and insulated magmas.”
Very near the beginning is the usual dogmatic assertion quoted above. Plutonic Volcanic rocks are millions of years old, because they form deep in the earth and that’s how long it must take them to harden. No evidence. No proof. Just the minions gathering around with open mouths and adoring eyes at this “truth” that needs no proof.

#2
Circular reasoning is essential for obfuscation

“Age dating” [is]“never fully successful as…observed damage halo was also a function of…the crystalline structure of the host mineral.”
Obfuscation means making clear stuff murky. The article claims that you can’t use radiohalos to date rock samples because the results also depend on the age of the “host mineral”, which uniformitarians “know” is millions of years. In other words, see point one above. And all the minions said, “ooohh.”

#3
Invent an adversary
The Talk Origins Radiohalos article mentions “Gentry’s Thesis” as if this scientist were the only originator and exclusive propagator of the theory they want to discredit. The work they seek to refute has been a scientific position since at least 1918 and represents the work of many scientists past and present. There is no “Gentry Thesis”, but this artificial man and this misrepresented theory are easy to attack and discredit. They also mention the “Polonium Halo Hypothesis”, which is also a fake construct, because Polonium radiohalo information is not a theory. It is a tested and long-proven fact. This all reminds me of the “Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good” mantra of the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

#4
Tell people you’ve put a lot of work into this … whatever it is
“… Decades of intensive field and laboratory investigations by thousands of geologists.”
Talk Origins asserts that because lots of people who worked a long time on lots of rocks disagree with that imaginary single man mentioned above, he can’t possibly be right.

#5
Trust me, I’m a scientist, and I’m ‘way smarter than you or that guy you’ve been listening to

The Talk Origins article contains the assertion that Gentry was never properly qualified to speak on radiohalos in rock samples because he wasn’t a geologist, he was a physicist. How a physicist is not qualified to talk about radiohalos is anybody’s guess. But this secularist “teaching moment” is essential to convince the uninitiated that the high priest is the only one qualified to dispel the ignorance of the masses on their religious beliefs. Any creationist can be immediately dismissed as a reliable source if the secularist asserts he doesn’t have the proper qualifications to speak on the subject they want to discredit him about..

Hubby got into a fb message conversation with a person who adopted the position that he had never worked in the sciences and was therefore not qualified to speak in the discussion groups where he participates. The truth is that he has postgraduate coursework, has taught science, and is perfectly qualified. But his comments are dismissed because he isn’t a member of the secularist high priesthood. “Go away, little man. I’ve tried to be nice, but you won’t listen. Your words are of no importance.” Well, no, he’s not going away. The minions need to hear the truth with proof.